


Black Pearl

by ConstanceComment



Category: A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman, Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Book/Movie Fusion, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Horror, Community: makinghugospin, F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Kink Meme, Lovecraftian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:57:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is not the sun, she is not the stars. She is the space between them and the bottom of the ocean, an abyss of a girl, waiting and hungry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Pearl

**Author's Note:**

> Filled [here](http://makinghugospin.livejournal.com/13289.html?thread=8602089#t8602089) on the kinkmeme, the prompt is [here.](http://makinghugospin.livejournal.com/13289.html?thread=8541417#t8541417)
> 
> This will make a lot more sense if you go read Neil Gaiman's [A Study in Emerald](http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf), which is where this fusion came from.

The girl is beautiful.

Of course she is beautiful; Marius loves her from the first, how could she not be beautiful? She is radiant from the inside-out, her eyes shining-wet and turned down demurely, her skin pale and near-glowing in the sunlight.

Marius sees her for all of a moment before he falls; a moment is all it takes, they say, for a man to fall, to be ensnared. her eyes flash once, then the pupils open, oscillating wide to envelope all the white there, her irises blown to the edge of the orb. Quickly, they flicker in again but it is too late; Marius is caught and he never wants to be free.

Later, returning to the side of his friends Marius sings to them in strange verse of a girl with dark hair and darker eyes. His clothes are torn and disarrayed moreso than usual, the disorder spreading to his whole being. Marius’s eyes burn, his frame shudders; he is perpetually out of breath as if he ran to them, hands covered in dirt, his face smeared with a thin layer of moisture. As Marius speaks his voice is pious and cracking, his rhyme scheme a near-atonal thing that Jehan is the first to recognize and shudder at, eyes going before he closes them in mourning for his friend. 

Bahorel, too, hears the call, sees the collective widening of eyes and bolt of shock that swings around the revolutionary band. Joly startles, a gray pallor cast over his face before he leans into Bossuet, the bald man pulling him close before leaning his head against the wall, face turned up to the ceiling that blocks out the haunting sight of the blood red moon that the ten -now nine- of them have always hated so desperately.

Standing at the wall Bahorel sees Grantaire tip his head and the bottle back, drinking fast as gravity will carry him; he has always been more susceptible to the Old Ones and their haunting allure than the rest of them. Bahorel remembers the fight where Grantaire first explained their pull to him, his lips cut open, his fists cracked upon the six skulls of their assailants as they laid bleeding on the flagstones.

“I am empty, brave Bahorel,” Grantaire had explained, moon shining full and gravid on his curly hair, eyes wide and staring, smile wry and weary, “and there is nothing that they love so much as empty. Like calls to like; the abyss would swallow itself if it could and instead it reaches for me and those like myself, we bastard children who believe in nothing, the perfect appetizer until it can at last devour itself.”

Grantaire had leaned against the wall, then, and stared up at the moon, red light drowning in his eyes. “I fight,” he said, “and drink because anything is better than being alone with my thoughts. It always gets harder to tell when they are mine, and when I am theirs.”

After that, Bahorel had introduced Grantaire to Jehan, and let the poet try and ward him, an augur of skulls collected before them before the situation was pronounced incurable, a slow infection of the soul. Grantaire smiled as if he already knew, and had returned to the bottle he took from the bar before he and Bahorel were tossed out for fighting to settle their blood, boiling over for reasons different and the same.

Now Bahorel looks to the poet for confirmation, and sees the shake of Jehan’s head as he carefully places his hands upon his ears, closing his eyes as he rocks on his heels, reciting softly the words of faith, the words of light. Bahorel looks up to Enjolras in horror and sick hope, seeking relief, some denial of his fears. Instead Enjolras slowly shakes his head and beside him Courfeyrac startles visibly, almost angrily. Combeferre puts a quelling hand on his arm, that same shake of the head passed down slow, the intention clear; Marius is lost to them, symptoms faster than Grantiare. It is only a matter of time, and there is no use for a bomb in the room with them when the fuse has been lit.

If Bahorel had not already been looking to Enjolras, he would have missed entirely the moment when exhaustion creeps over him. It is fleeting, quick, then he is strong again, back tall, spine straight as he looks down on Marius and angry casts him out, a charming young man so capable of being terrible, so terribly burdened by the things he must do.

Marius flees, spitting from the café at the lash Enjolras’s tongue gives him, the firebrand’s words striking hard as Enjolras denounces his new love, his firm beliefs, his staring eyes. Bahorel prays he would come back; they cannot overthrow the monarchs alone. According to Grantaire they can never overthrow them at all, but Paris remembers the last revolution, the scant moments they had been free before the commune turned upon itself in a tide of blood, the gods laughing at them for the murder of their sick twisted children.

Marius, of course, returns. His pearl, dark-shining, has fled him, off to England with her human father. At his side is Éponine, dark-hiding, a shadow to Marius as his own splits in two, shivering faintly on the walls. Bahorel would worry but he is glad of her, of the care that someone could still show to Marius even as his skin grows translucent in the moonlight.

Bahorel does not live to see her die, but when Marius climbs the Barricade at her fall, the whole city quakes with his anger. It is Courfeyrac, in the end, who sees the old man take Marius from the Barricades, slipping free with him after the execution of the spy. Courfeyrac’s blood is hot and boiling as he thinks of all he has lost, Gavroche, Bahorel, Jehan and now Marius, again, to the man Courfeyrac only too later realizes is the owner of a handkerchief. He wonders, bitterly, if Marius is to be tribute or bride, a gift for the man’s daughter or to the English royalty, the Queen in all her glory waiting rapt upon the waters.

In his skull Courfeyrac hears the gods’ children laughing at him, and he hoists the standard, retreating with Enjolras and Combeferre, tired to his human bones as the retreat is called, Grantaire asleep on the floor of the café.

His own end comes in a hail of bullets, shot up through the floor. With him falls Combeferre and below them rises Grantaire, who bleary climbs the steps to stand by Enjolras.

“Do you permit it?” He asks, holding out a hand where his flesh roils quietly over unnamed things, shadows cast up through the skin to slide over bone.

Enjolras smiles at him like long-lost sunlight, and takes his hand as Grantaire declares himself revolutionary, one last defiance of their masters for the both of them before the bullets shatter their bones, letting loose what it was that waited in Grantaire.

Later, the café is discovered in morning, a shell of walls knocked out from the inside, claw marks and black ichor strewn indiscriminately across the wreckage. Found by washer women forced in on pain of death are two once-human corpses. One is still smiling, the other is merely a husk and spine, blown open from the inside rather like the building’s walls, ebon ichor trailing from its paper skin to pool by the bottle of blood-red wine still clutched in one boneless hand.

Months later, Marius wakes in darkness, and finds the smiling eyes of his love. She heals him, slowly, trading kisses and venom in equal measures, dark things slipping in past his tongue when he opens his mouth to hers. The night of their wedding her father passes, drained and empty, his duty fulfilled, his energy gone.

Marius looks to his bride and sees the future; she looks at him and sees a beloved meal.


End file.
